Thursday, May 31, 2012

Just how obtuse can you get? In a misguided effort to combat rising obesity, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is seriously proceeding with a sweeping policy proposal to enact a city-wide ban on the sale of large soft drinks and other sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters and street carts…

“The proposed ban would affect virtually the entire menu of popular sugary drinks found in delis, fast-food franchises and even sports arenas, from energy drinks to pre-sweetened iced teas. The sale of any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces — about the size of a medium coffee, and smaller than a common soda bottle — would be prohibited under the first-in-the-nation plan, which could take effect as soon as next March.”

Think about that. If this ban goes into effect, then here in the United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave, the country where oppressed people everywhere have fled to for centuries now to enjoy liberty and take hold of their birthright as human beings: the right to self-determination and to make choices about their own lives for themselves without the interference of tyrants or despots, here in a country such as this, one of its greatest cities will be telling grown adults that they can’t drink a drink if it’s too big (by whose standard?) or has too much sugar in it (according to whose judgment?). Of course you could just get two small ones. Or a large one with some milk in it...

News reports of corruption, negligence and poor judgment at the United Nations have left many shaking their heads at the international body in recent decades.
A new film by Ami Horowitz and Matthew Groff, set to premiere in select theaters on June 1, aims to trace the U.N.’s decline from an institution created in 1945 — “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small … and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace” — to one that would honor Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe as a “Global Leader for Tourism.”
Horowitz, a self-described right-of-center foreign policy hawk, explained that the film, “U.N. Me,” is meant as a visual op-ed directed in a fashion suited to capture Americans’ elusive attention spans.

Drugmakers led by Pfizer (PFE) (PFE) Inc. agreed to run a “very significant public campaign” bankrolling political support for the 2010 health-care law, including TV ads, while the Obama administration promised to block provisions opposed by drugmakers, documents released by Republicans show.
The internal memos and e-mails for the first time unveil the industry's plan to finance positive TV ads and supportive groups, along with providing $80 billion in discounts and taxes that were included in the law. The administration has previously denied the existence of a deal involving political support.

Israeli scientists have cultivated a cannabis plant that doesn't get people stoned in a development that may help those smoking marijuana for medical purposes, a newspaper said on Wednesday.
According to the Maariv daily, the new cannabis looks, smells and even tastes the same, but does not induce any of the feelings normally associated with smoking marijuana that are brought on by the substance THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol.
"It has the same scent, shape and taste as the original plant -- it's all the same -- but the numbing sensation that users are accustomed to has disappeared," said Tzahi Klein, head of development at Tikkun Olam, the firm that developed the species.

A short compilation of what's new on the statist compost heap. These items all appear on just one day's news on a popular internet site and they just happen to be the ones that caught my eye.

Christine Lagarde, the head IMF idiot, recently scolded the Greeks for not paying their taxes. Fair enough it seems, until you learn that she herself, and many other parasites like her at the IMF and the UN, pay no taxes. That's right, her overblown salary is all tax exempt. I'm sure the idiot missed the irony.

NYC Mayor Bloomberg is pushing a new law to ban large sugary soft-drinks in that nanny-state hell hole. With apologies to the many fine people who live in our biggest city, I feel your pain. I live near Chicago, which is more of a criminal enterprise than a city. The imbecilic Mayor Boobberg is going to take care of those of you who might become obese without his iron fisted tough love.

In a recent speech honoring a Polish war hero, President Obama referred to a "Polish death camp", as opposed to a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland. Oh c-mon, it's just a slip of the tongue! Everyone does it occasionally and it's perfectly excusable... as long as you are a Democrat. But the slip of the tongue was on the teleprompter, so it was a team slip. Oops.

The new French government is putting a cap on "excessive corporate pay." Anything François Hollande - the goof who was just elected to lead the dumbest country in the Euro funny farm - makes over one Euro is excessive in my opinion. The few intelligent people left in that country are making their escape plans, but where to flee?

I try to make my comments about ideas rather than people, but sometimes the bad ideas and the bad people get mixed up in the same rancid stew. I apologize for the name calling. (Well, maybe not, I'm only semi-polite most of time anyway.)

At university Roberts was taught neo-classical economics, but he believes that Austrian economics provides the best lessons in how the economy really works. He is attracted to the idea that money can only last, when it's chosen by the people -- a sentiment that he hopes the Silver Circle promotes. He believes that competing currencies could be a good way to transition towards a better monetary system.

This podcast was recorded on May16 2012 at the Hard Assets Investment Conference in New York:

The newest and fastest growing political grouping in the USA is driven by the idea that the problems that are facing the nation today have been caused not just by the Left wing or the Right wing, but by the mainstream of both parties, which have for years been eliminating our civil rights, sponsoring and benefiting from a crony corporatist economic system, and operating a militaristic foreign policy, seemingly to the benefit of a military industrial complex more than that to the benefit of the nation.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Mitt Romney’s new iPhone app, With Mitt, “lets you customize photos with a variety of Mitt-inspired artistic frames.” Slogans like “Believe in America,” “Obama Isn’t Working,” and “I’m a Mom for Mitt” are just a few of the Mitt-tastic phrases that can be slapped on your iPhone photos, proudly pronouncing your support of the GOP candidate.
If only he was equally as concerned with supporting our great nation. Much to the delighted displeasure of Twitter, one particular frame option betrays Romney’s secret agenda working toward bettering a place known as Amercia.
Yes, that’s A-M-E-R-C-I-A.

Obama's stimulus was an epic fail. Only the government can create jobs at $4.1 million a job!

The Congressional Budget Office in a new report:
When [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] was being considered, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that it would increase budget deficits by $787 billion between fiscal years 2009 and 2019. CBO now estimates that the total impact over the 2009–2019 period will amount to about $831 billion.

Congressman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) is locked in one of the most watched primary elections tonight. He faces Beto O’Rourke, a businessman and former member of the El Paso City Council. Observers have noted that the election has become a referendum on Reyes’ close ties to the defense contracting industry.
Reyes is a proud Drug War proponent — last year, he suggested that the American military should send weaponized drones into Mexico for targeted assassinations. And as Reyes has called for militarizing homeland security issues, several of his family members have gained jobs at defense companies linked to the congressman.
In contrast, O’Rourke has argued for relaxing some of America’s more draconian drug laws, including our backwards and unpopular policies towards marijuana.

Guest post by Jonathan H. Adler, a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law and a regular contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy.
In my past two posts I’ve made a brief case for approaching environmental problems from a property rights perspective. In the first post I noted that Garrett Hardin identified private property (or something formally like it) as a solution to the “tragedy of the commons,” and suggested that this sort of approach has been under-utilized in modern environmental policy. In a second post I discussed how the recognition of property rights in fisheries have, in fact, prevented the tragedy of the commons in marine fisheries. This is because transferable property rights, where properly defined and effectively enforced, align an owner’s incentives with the value of the underlying resource. Fisheries are in trouble the world over, but property-based management regimes are a demonstrated way to prevent overfishing and fishery collapse.
The creative extension of property rights to ecological resources could help address many environmental problems. Particularly in the case of natural resources, property rights are a viable and demonstrated means of enhancing sustainability, particularly when compared to the available political alternatives.

Unemployed Americans are desperate to find work as they scramble to apply for jobs in numbers that far exceed job openings.

At the Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Alabama more than 20,000 people have applied for one of the 877 job openings.... These are not unusual stories. Similar stories have been reported for years. Back in 2009, it was reported that GE advertised for 90 washing machine assembly jobs in Louisville, KY and 10,000 folks showed up to apply. The GE jobs were paying $27,000 a year or $519.23 a week or $12.98 an hour. Just 4 years ago, the same washing machine assembly line job paid $19 an hour.
As middle class factory workers are being forced to take 30% plus wage cuts, Bankster and CEO compensation continues to soar out of the stratosphere.... While workers are now being thrust into the stone cold reality of free market wages during a period of profound inflation, government induced monetary devaluation and massive corporate welfare, the elites of our thieving and corrupt economic system continue to stockpile for themselves the crème de la crème of national riches. The bankster and crony capitalists are exempt from free market competition.

Marlborough, Massachusetts - Dozens of Ron Paul backers showed up at a state Republican Party meeting last night to protest what they say is a manipulation of power aimed at decreasing their influence at the party’s national convention.
A 14-member GOP committee charged with allocating delegates to the convention held a closed meeting at the Holiday Inn to discuss whether three delegates and three alternates selected at the Fifth Congressional District caucus should be invalidated.
None of the Romney-backed delegates won any of the six seats for the district...

Alex Jones was banned from the Westfields Marriott Washington Dulles hotel in Chantilly, Virginia on Tuesday two days before the start of the 2012 Bilderberg conference.
Contacted by Bryan Stolz, Director of Hotel Operations at Marriott International, Jones was told that his room booking was cancelled and that he and his crew would be banned from entering the premises of the hotel.

In America it's OKAY for the police to taser a pregnant woman over a minor traffic violation.

Federal ruling granting officers immunity for tasering a pregnant woman over a speeding ticket will stand.
The nation's highest court decided yesterday it would not re-open the case of a pregnant woman tasered three times by Seattle, Washington police over a minor speeding infraction. The US Supreme Court denied the request of Officers Steven L. Daman, Juan Ornelas and Donald M. Jones who sought to overturn the March 2010 decision of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that the officers used excessive force on November 23, 2004 (view opinion).
That finding leaves officers vulnerable to a state suit, but motorist Malaika Brooks was equally upset with the appellate court's finding that the officers were immune from liability for their actions.

As the concentration of wealth and power accelerates, two of the New World Orders biggest names unite.

Two of the best-known business dynasties in Europe and the US will come together after Lord Jacob Rothschild’s listed investment trust and Rockefeller Financial Services agreed to form a strategic partnership.
RIT Capital Partners is to buy a 37 per cent stake in the Rockefeller’s wealth advisory and asset management group for an undisclosed sum, giving Lord Rothschild’s London-listed trust a much sought-after foothold in the US.
The transatlantic union brings together David Rockefeller, 96, and Lord Rothschild, 76 – two family patriarchs whose personal relationship spans five decades.

Republicans are notorious for keeping their old dead wood but kudos to the El Paso Dems who got rid of an 8 term congress critter and replaced him with a pro-marijuana candidate.

A Texas congressional candidate who favors marijuana legalization beat eight-term incumbent El Paso Rep. Silvestre Reyes Tuesday in the Democratic primary for the congressional district closest to Mexico's Ciudad Juarez....
Reyes was less exuberant in defeat, slamming "my opponent who deliberately ran a nasty, dirty campaign."
The race received national attention because of O'Rourke's position in support of marijuana legalization. In his second term as an El Paso city representative, O'Rourke pushed for a resolution calling for a re-examination of the drug war, which has killed tens of thousands in neighboring Mexico over the past decade. He also co-authored a book on the same subject.
The drug war is "a failure," O'Rourke told HuffPost in April, adding that marijuana is "the cornerstone of the cartel economy" and thus fuels the violence in El Paso's sister city.

More and more public schools are using TeenScreen, a controversial mental health screening diagnostic, despite public protests, myriad problems, and known conflicts of interest....Allen Jones, former investigator with the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General, charges that the translation of normal human emotions into symptoms of mental illness is driven not by genuine concern for kids, but by a profit motive. “TeenScreen was developed and promoted by persons with deep financial ties to makers of psychiatric drugs,” said Jones. Indeed, a stated priority of the TeenScreen program is to “connect” kids with mental health treatment – which all-too-often means prescribing psychotropic drugs.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

New York State accounted for the biggest migration exodus of any state in the nation between 2000 and 2010, with 3.4 million residents leaving over that period, according to the Tax Foundation.
Over that decade the state gained 2.1 million, so net migration amounted to 1.3 million, representing a loss of $45.6 billion in income.
Where are they escaping to? The Tax Foundation found that more than 600,000 New York residents moved to Florida over the decade – opting perhaps for the Sunshine State’s more lenient tax system – taking nearly $20 billion in adjusted growth income with them.
Over that same time period, 208,794 Pennsylvanians moved to Florida, taking $8 billion in income.

Earlier this month, the Mexican government arrested three high-ranking Army generals "including a former second in command at the Defense Ministry," The New York Times reported.
According to multiple press reports, Tomás Ángeles Dauahare, who retired in 2008, was an under secretary at the Defense Ministry during the first two years of President Felipe Calderón's "war" against some narcotrafficking cartels and had even been mentioned as a "possible choice for the top job."
The Times disclosed that in the early 1990s Ángeles "served as the defense attaché at the Mexican Embassy in Washington," a plum position with plenty of perks awarded to someone thought by his Pentagon brethren to have impeccable credentials; that is, if smoothing the way the for drugs to flow can be viewed as a bright spot on one's résumé.
The other top military men detained in Mexico City were "Brig. Gen. Roberto Dawe González, assigned to a base in Colima State, and Gen. Ricardo Escorcia Vargas, who is retired."
Reuters reported that "Dawe headed an army division in the Pacific state of Colima, which lies on a key smuggling route for drugs heading to the United States, and had also served in the violent border state of Chihuahua."
When queried at a May 18 press conference in Washington, "whether and to what extent" these officers participated in the $1.6 billion taxpayer-financed boondoggle known as the Mérida Initiative or had received American training, Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Col. Robert L. Ditchey II tersely told reporters, "We are not going to get into those specifics."
Inquiring minds can't help but wonder what does the Pentagon, or certain three-lettered secret state agencies, have to hide?

Police drones flying over Virginia would be "great" and "the right thing to do" for the same reasons they are so effective in a battlefield environment, the state's chief executive said Tuesday.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, says he is open to any technology that makes law enforcement more productive. The use of drones, which was recently endorsed by the police chiefs of Fairfax County and D.C., would make better use of valuable police resources.

California Fish Contaminated with Fukushima Radiation....The ocean currents head from Japan to the West Coast of the U.S.
Of course, fish don’t necessarily stay still, either. For example, the Telegraph notes that scientists tagged a bluefin tuna and found that it crossed between Japan and the West Coast three times in 600 days...

Neocons are bragging about purging Paulites, Buchananites and Arabists from the GOP.

Pat Buchanan fills us in on a cocky Bill Kristol who seems to think that "Ron Paul types" have been purged from the Republican Party and that Kristol will be more than happy to see Ron Paul leave:
"The big story in the Republican Party over the last 30 years, and I'm very happy about this," said Kristol, is the "eclipsing" of the George H.W. Bush-James Baker-Brent Scowcroft realists, "an Arabist old-fashioned Republican Party ... very concerned about relations with Arab states that were not friendly with Israel ... ."
That Bush crowd is yesterday, said Kristol. And not only had the "Arabists" like President Bush been shoved aside by the neocons, the "Pat Buchanan/Ron Paul type" of Republican has been purged.